Back of a man's neck showing black bold lettering tattoo reading </head> and <body>, styled as HTML code tags, below a tan cap.

HTML head and body tags on the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a man wearing a tan cap, showing a tattoo on the back of the neck. The tattoo reads </head> on the top line and <body> beneath it, set in a bold sans-serif typeface in solid black ink. The text is centred on the neck and the grey shirt collar and cap fill the frame around it.

Lettering Neck Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By half past six the cutting room smells of oil and wet coal dust, and the lead is already warm in the pot. You set the last bulletin of the Ashgrove Colliery by hand, the way old Tudor taught you, one sort at a time, reading backwards in the stick. The masthead goes first. You close the name of the pit with a heavy rule, then the village beneath it, and then you stop, because the paper wants the next thing and you have not decided what that is.

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Mrs Pryce has rung the shop every afternoon since the owners pinned the notice to the chapel gate. She wants the names printed before the shift board comes down: the men who went under in the 1961 fall set in the same face as the men going now. You tell her the column is full. She tells you that is not what she asked. You have marked the copy in the margin with a pencil, the way Tudor did, a slash and a word to show where a section ends, a plain word to show where the next begins. Head, then body. It started as a habit from the days when compositors scribbled their own instructions on the galleys, and you have never found a reason to stop.

The proof comes off the press wet and grey at eleven. You hang it on the line above the stove to dry, and the lamp catches the black letters so the page looks almost solid enough to lean on. Every name is square and even, with no space left for doubt. Below the last one you leave a line blank, because everyone who reads the paper in the Welfare will know what belongs there, and you are not the one who has to say it.